Jetbrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 7.0. This version rounds out support for many popular Java technologies while adding support for additional languages such as Groovy and Ruby. Among its highlights:

Spring and Hibernate Support

Improved Performance on Multi-Core CPU's

Eclipse and Maven Integration

Improved Version Control Support Including ClearCase

Ruby/Rails Support

Groovy/Grails Support

Debugger Enhancements

Dependency Structure Matrix

InfoQ talked with Ann Oreshnikova of Jetbrains about the release. Oreshnikova was first asked about how Jetbrains views the Java IDE market and the competition of the products in it:

Java IDE market keeps evolving, and this is the most pleasant thing about it. We all know that evolution is a natural result of competition. With regard to it, the Java market today is indeed very special. Competition here is not even because of slightly different audience segments targeted by different vendors. To tell the truth, we believe that competition between the 2 free tools is much tougher that between any one of them and IntelliJ IDEA. As for the segments where we might compete, our main weapons are: innovation, highest quality, productivity that we ensure and pleasant development on top of that. These are actually the main reasons why the number of our customers is not just enviably stable, but keeps growing.

The topic then shifted language support including Groovy, Ruby, and Flex:

Ruby and Groovy are gaining more and more popularity in the development world. Among IntelliJ IDEA users there are many followers of these new technologies, and their requests for support have played a decisive role in adding Ruby and Groovy to this new version. Getting back to your question about the trend, I would say that yes, IntelliJ IDEA is already a cross-language IDE, and is going to continue being such.

InfoQ then asked Oreshnikova about the fact that IntelliJ IDEA 7 includes a number of "why now" features in 7 such as Hibernate, Spring, and Maven support. All of these projects have been around for several versions of IntelliJ:

At first glance, this is a reasonable question, but on the other hand we have to admit that even being around for several years Spring and Hibernate have become the de facto standard not longer than a year/year-and-a-half ago. So, when it happened, it was a sign for us to include them into our roadmap. One can say that they appeared too late in IntelliJ IDEA, but it’s better to be a bit late and bring the best in the market support.

The conversation then shifted to the most difficult feature to develop:

Hmmm. This is a tough question. Many of them were rather difficult and challenging, just from different aspects. If I had to pick one that was technically especially hard to solve, it would be multi-core/CPU support. We had to really fight with it, but the performance leap that we achieved in the IDE editor is definitely worth all those efforts.

Finally, Oreshnikova was asked about the next evolutionary change coming for IDE's:

It’s true. Development tools not only reflect the existing development trends but also form them. As for the next evolutionary change, we believe that it’s going to be the so-called polyglot programming (I have borrowed this term from Neal Ford as it nicely applies to the modern trends). When widely adopted, the polyglot approach may even affect architectural decisions, not only everyday programming techniques. Thus an IDE capable of supporting productive multi-language development, through seamless language and framework integration, should become the best developers’ friend.

Do you know if some issues with the performace were fixed in general? I have used IDEA and noticed it could hang on time to time. I believe it could be adjusted, and I feel the progress of the IDEA team form the 3rd version till the 6th. It is great progress, but the computers also becomes faster...